Why search for case reports?
Some clinical questions arise when standard guidance doesn’t fully explain what you’re seeing in clinical practice. Case reports are especially useful when a situation doesn’t align neatly with existing guidelines — for example, an unusual presentation, a rare adverse reaction, or cases where clinicians had to adapt when standard approaches didn’t quite fit.
What makes them challenging to find consistently?
Case reports aren’t labeled consistently across journals or databases. Sometimes they’re identified through subject indexing, sometimes by document type, and sometimes in the title or abstract. Because ProQuest One Health & Nursing searches across multiple databases at the same time, there isn’t a single step that captures every case report.
Instead, we’ll take a structured approach that looks for case reports from more than one angle and then combines those results. The goal isn’t to memorize steps, but to use a pattern you can repeat whenever you need case reports on a specific topic.
Watch to see how it's done:
Using this workflow beyond case reports
Many of the steps used to find case reports are also used to locate other specialized document types, such as systematic reviews. If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough of this broader pattern, see the guide on finding systematic reviews.